Sunday, July 24, 2011

The whale shark is the biggest fish in the world

A diver that was close to be swallowed by a whale shark while the giant was feeding with plankton was captured by a photographer. Mauricio Handler took the picture in the waters of Mujeres Island in Mexico. It was a moment when all the 600 whale sharks from that area gathered at one place to feed with plankton, according to Daily Mail in the online edition.

This is a very usual thing, that the whale sharks to gather every years into the Mexico’s waters in order to feed them but they aren’t a danger for the divers. The animals are swimming with their huge mouths open in order to have a big quantity of water and food.

The mouth of a whale shark can reach 1,5 meters width and it has 350 rows of teeth. Handler said after this one in a life time event that the image with the diver that was very close to the whale shark’s mouth was an incredible adrenaline scene.

He admitted that in the moment when someone is on water and around him there are only fishes there is a completely new world out there, with other rules and beautiful things. He said that the incident happened right in the moment that the whale shark was feeding and the animal went on his colleague’s direction.

The whale shark is the biggest fish in the world, but is not dangerous for the people. The animal can have a weight of 40 tons and it feeds with planktons and little fish. Because of the animal’s conduct around the people a lot of photographers wanted over the time to capture it into their pictures.The scientists from Mozambique tried to measure last year a whale shark and they photographed the animal with a very performing device that uses the laser technology. They wanted to know the period in which the whale shark gets to 20 meters length.